Gradari is a founder-led paid ads agency built on one belief: qualify before you scale. We connect your CRM to your ad platforms so the algorithms learn who your real customers are.
Kyle Rutledge
Founder & Lead Strategist
Ad spend managed
Across Kyle's career
Peak ROAS
Custom Van Builder campaign
Businesses served
Across Kyle's career
Gradari clients served
Since 2023
Kyle Rutledge spent 14+ years in marketing before founding Gradari. Starting in photography and video production, moving into in-house marketing, and eventually graduating from one of the top marketing programs in the country before joining one of the top digital marketing agencies in the U.S. as a paid media strategist.
On paper, things were going well. Campaigns were performing. Numbers were trending in the right direction. Then the client calls started telling a different story.
Fall 2018. A dashboard full of green numbers. Leads were up, CPL was down, and Kyle had just finished explaining enthusiastically how well things were going. More volume, lower costs, month-over-month improvements.
The client told him his sales team was drowning. Spam calls. Confused prospects who never filled out a form. Zero closed deals.
He moved to the next call. Same room. Same dashboard. Better results. Same story from the client. Things were getting worse.
That was the moment. Not a strategy session or a course. Two back-to-back calls where the platform said one thing and the business said the opposite. Something fundamental was broken, and it wasn't the campaigns.
The problem was the signals feeding the algorithm.
Ad platforms don't know what a real customer looks like unless you show them. Without CRM data feeding back into the platform, Google and Meta optimize for the easiest conversions, not the best ones. The more you scale, the more the algorithm doubles down on the wrong audience. It looks like progress right up until the sales team tells you otherwise.
Kyle spent the next several years building and refining the fix across dozens of accounts, connecting HubSpot, Salesforce, and HighLevel to Google and Meta, mapping lifecycle stages into conversion signals, and testing what happened when the platform could see which leads actually became customers.
The clearest proof came from one of the largest accounts he managed. A client had scaled paid ad spend to nearly $1.8 million per month trying to drive more qualified leads. The opposite was happening. More spend, more leads, fewer that converted. The Reverse Optimization Trap at full scale.
When offline conversion tracking was installed and the CRM was connected to the ad platforms, the results flipped almost immediately. The sales team went from starved to overwhelmed. Over the following months, monthly ad spend was cut from $1.8M to $500K, then to $300K, and results kept improving. Less spend. Better leads. More closed deals. Once the system was working, the conversation shifted from cutting waste to scaling what was actually producing revenue.
That was the Lead Quality Framework proven at scale.
By the end of his time at the agency, Kyle had achieved 103.6% client retention over 12 months, earning the 100 Club Award as a top performer at an agency ranked number one in the U.S. by Clutch.co from 2021 through 2024. Gradari was founded in 2023 to make that same system accessible to lead generation businesses without enterprise budgets.
Gradari is derived from the Latin concept of moving forward. Continuous progression and advancement. Growth isn't a destination, it's a direction. That's the principle the agency was built on.
These aren't values on a wall. They're the decisions we make every day when scoping campaigns, reviewing results, and talking to clients.
Gradari is the pursuit of continuous growth, in business and in life. In marketing, that means constantly testing, learning, and improving. We never accept where we are as good enough. Forward is always the direction.
We want to work with people we can trust completely. That means honesty, fairness, a strong ethical foundation, and the authenticity to show up as who you actually are. Trust isn't built through words. It's built through consistent action over time. Business runs at the speed of trust. Everything we do, internally and with clients, depends on it.
Character without competence is goodwill without output. We expect everyone on this team to know their craft, take ownership of their results, and hold themselves to a high standard of execution. Being trustworthy means people can count on you to get the job done well.
We work with go-getters. People who see a problem and move toward it, not around it. If something can be improved, act on it. What we won't accept is knowing something is broken and leaving it sit. See it, own it, solve it.
Kyle's background and why Gradari exists.
Kyle Rutledge
Founder, Gradari
After years managing paid acquisition campaigns, Kyle noticed a recurring pattern. Businesses generated more leads, but sales teams struggled to close them. Instead of accepting that tension as normal, he traced it back to its source.
The root problem wasn't the ads. It was the signals feeding the algorithms. Without revenue data, ad platforms optimized for the cheapest conversions instead of the best customers. The platform thought it was winning. The business knew it was losing.
Enterprise companies had solved this by connecting revenue data back into their ad platforms. Most growing businesses had no idea the solution existed. Gradari was built to change that.
Most agencies will tell you to spend more. We'll show you why that's the wrong next step, and what to do instead.
